This is an indication of support for the Steam distribution platform, and some Valve games on Linux. Good luck getting EA to build Linux binaries for their games, because Steam doesn't do that for you.

Good on Valve for going this way, and maybe it's the push big publishers need to start telling devs to create native Linux binaries, but don't think for a moment that that this means all Steam games will run natively on Linux.

OTOH what Steam could provide is keeping known versions of Linux libs (hey, that includes Winelib;) ), making things much simpler. With the amount of control Valve perhaps has...who knows, perhaps many games ("simpler" ones at the beginning) could be semi-automatically adapted to included version of Wine, too.

I run WoW in WINE, and with very reasonable results (I get some visual artefacts, but only single frames of some incorrect polygon shapes). If Valve were working on bundling custom WINE launchers for each game... That might work.

No, it's because the malware programmers have little motivation to create software for the 1% of computers that have more qualified admins. If linux reaches 99% of users, suddenly it will have all kinds of software for it which run very well, hordes of people looking for exploits, etc - malware. MacOS is getting more popular, soon it will start having trouble, I'm sure. Market shares are at http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9 [hitslink.com]

Because the journalists that coined the phrase were too stupid to know what it meant?

This term came from the same bunch of idiots that gave us "blogging" and "blogosphere" "web 2.0" and "podcasting" that we are now forever stuck with because they are trendy and catchy...

Rooting a box means gaining control of the root account. rootkits were typically a kit of tools you used to root a box, to get that root password or escalate your login to root privileges. . What we see as rootkits today are NOT rootkits. They are simply malware that used a bug to get in and run and then they hide themselves. Something that is NOT NEW and has been running around in computing for a very long time.

This is an indication of support for the Steam distribution platform, and some Valve games on Linux. Good luck getting EA to build Linux binaries for their games, because Steam doesn't do that for you.

I don't see why it couldn't. They could licence and bundle one of the Wine libs that exist for running Windows games on Linux and Mac and make the experience completely transparent to the end user. Games would have to be tested & certified of course, but other than that it wouldn't require EA or anyone e

You don't need to license Wine as it is freely available for redistribution under the GPL. When Sierra/Vivendi re-released many of their classic adventure games, they came bundled with Dosbox to make the games work. They didn't have to license Dosbox, as it is GPL. They could simply redistribute it.

Ya that's the real problem. I mean while Steam and Impulse and so on are cool, currently they are not the be-all, end-all in games, or even the biggest sales channel. Retail is still where the most games are sold. So it isn't like the problem with games on Linux was that the distribution channel was closed to Linux, though the games could be available. The problem is that the games themselves aren't being ported to Linux.

Funny story - true story. You buy the retail box, then upload the Key to Steam and download and install that way. So really once Steam gets some proper Linux support for their games (through testing as mentioned by others by the various means)

As a full time Linux user. I for one welcome the advance of having Steam run on Linux. Since that'll take from the fan boys of not having the gaming abilities. Linux CAN in fact be a all purpose desktop. Just because it's naturally born as a Server OS doesn't mean i

With the Mac OS port, it isn't just the Steam client, but also the Source engine. All the Source-engine games are ported. With a Linux port, expect to see all the Source titles avaiable. Will every Steam game be available in Linux? No, but it would be a new channel for commercial Linux games to be sold.

I must disagree - availability of games is a major reason why linux on the desktop hasn't taken off. It's certainly the only reason I have a windows install at all.At this point, I buy most of my games through Steam, simply because it has the best offerings of all the electronic distribution channels. The only thing missing from it is some kind of family account that lets you share your games with more than one login. Having it manage patching is dead handy, it's a one stop place for all games, and it allow

I'm pretty excited about this... there's been a lot of pretty bad news in the past couple years regarding Linux gaming... the current version of UT was promised a Linux port which never arrived, EVE gave up on their crappy Linux port (likely because it actually ran pretty well under wine), and id Software of all people has made menacing threats about future Linux support.

I've started playing a lot of Valve games lately, and now find it hard to go back to some of the other FPSs I've played before. The Steam

Sure, most games won't run natively just yet - only games based on Valve's source engine.

But when I'm on Steam (and I own dozens and dozens of games, put out by several different publishers), 99% of the time I'll be playing a Valve game. I currently have 300+ hours racked up in Team Fortress 2 alone.

If I can format my Windows gaming partition, and only play Valve games on Linux, I'd say it's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make. I suppose Valve will be the only publisher to get my purchases from now on.

Someone is obviously working on the idea, which is grand, but that's all we can tell at this point. The number of projects that are started and eventually canned because they're either to hard to finish, too costly, or just too expensive to bother marketing that they won't turn a profit is pretty vast.

The fact code exists does not necessarily mean we'll ever get to play the games.

But let's be optimistic. A native version of Steam would be pretty awesome. Here's hoping whoever is behind the project is successful.:)

The fact code exists does not necessarily mean we'll ever get to play the games.

Additionally, even if they fully port Source to Linux, most of the games on Steam don't use the Source engine. It would still be A Good Thing® as it would make the platform (Linux/x86) more viable if Steam supported it, which would serve to encourage other companies to release for Linux as well. It will be slow, but it has to start somewhere, and Steam/Valve has a very good reputation for being friendly to both content providers and gamers, providing the least offensive DRM out there.

Companies normally don't include "clutter" and left over files in a release tree. Normally, you would have a carefully prepared and checked distribution tree, where every file is accounted for. If steam now includes some linux libraries, I would take it as a very strong indication that they intend to use them.

Yes, I know, thanks. I wasn't talking about that in the first place. I was talking about my "company release tree". There's a whole bunch of legacy or tried-and-abandoned cruft in there that it's not worth anyone's time to remove. And yes, it goes out to customers, and no, they don't care; they only care if the things that they are paying for work.

If you (and I do mean you personally) are spending time doing that sort of tidying on you

Because it's far better to leave in some probably-unused sounds/models/textures than to actually remove them only to have the game plotz when you find out that, hey, they were being used for something somewhere.

Between APPL market cap catching up to MSFT, people moving off to apple products in droves,
google's dominance, and non-MS phones, plus the increasing user-friendlyness of Linux distros,
microsoft hasn't been in the news lately. Now I can *finally* move off of windows totally, if games
on linux take off.

Seems that the "Microsoft is dying" meme might well happen, but not due to a single MS-killer,
but emergence of new monopolies?

I don't think MS will ever die, but if they ever lose their grip on the desktop market, it won't have anything to do with linux (I'm typing this on FC-12 so I'm not a hater, just a realist). IMO it'll be increasing Apple market share in laptops (mostly young people) and secondly more and more people simply not caring what OS they are running as more stuff is done through the browser.

This is just anecdotal, but in the small town, but with 2 colleges and 2 universities within 30 miles, where I live I see more

Indeed -- the Linux binaries in Left 4 Dead were merely for dedicated servers. There was no news there, and the summary makes it seem like Phoronix had greater insight than they really did. Nearly every multiplayer game that runs on Windows has also included dedicated server binaries for Linux, including old Valve titles like Half-Life and Counter-Strike. They just extended that to include a command-line auto-updater that worked through Steam.

Or perhaps the lead (only?) programmer for Braid: http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364 [braid-game.com](I think there was another post saying "Screw this, it's not coming out for Linux," but that might just be at the end of the comments)

And having gone through large levels of painstaking kernel-level optimization based on best practices provided by both Valve and the community, I can honestly say that their dedicated Linux servers are Crap.

It annoys me too, because the big things that are annoying are things I could fix in half an hour with access to the source.

The script mentions both OS X and Linux, and after a quick Google search I couldn't find anything about HLDS on OS X. So I'm going to assume that it's for the Steam client. Unless they're porting HLDS to OS X, which I haven't heard anything about.

Feel free to correct me though.

Valve announced on March 9, 2010 that they were porting all their Source-based games to Mac. Your Mac Questions Answered [teamfortress.com] from the TF2 Blog has more details.

As an aspiring game developer, I look at Valve's actions with a lot of excitement lately. Steam and Source are coming to Mac for sure now, and so that means Source SDK should be updated to support deployment to Macs. If Linux is included in this package, it only sweetens the deal. For developers just getting started, Source would have a unique advantage over the other engines available currently (e.g. Unreal, Crytek) in that it would allow developers to reach as wide an audience as possible. I really hope this happens.

Unreal tech has been running natively on Mac and Linux as this was done years ago. You don't remember or haven't played Unreal Tournament 2004? Although that was the last Epic games title to run on Linux. UT3 was promised and still hasn't been ported to Linux and released publicly.

If they do this I will buy a few games the moment they are released. I hate DRM but this kind of development needs to be encouraged. Now if only ATI and/or Nvidia would open up their specs, or some open protocol/source solution would come into existence.

Steam currently falls into both of those categories, putting it in absolutely-won't-buy land. If it ever comes to Linux, I will probably buy at least a few games through it, but only when they are cheaper than otherwise.

Never used steam myself so maybe someone can enlighten me. The video drivers for Linux are crap compared to Windows, does this mean they have some way access the hardware properly? Or does it mean you need twice the hardware to run at the Windows equivalent performance?

On nvidia based hardware I got better performance in some games with Wine then running the same game in Windows. They might be closed source binary blobs, but they do work great.

On the flip side, my laptop (which runs WoW on the lowest settings) refuses to work at all with the binary ATI drivers. And the open source drivers crash X and don't give any real performance that you can use.

I don't know what world you're living in - FGLRX is buggy and will sometimes decide to start eating my memory like ice cream, but when it works it's not noticeably slower than the Windows drivers. Of course, the newest commercial Linux game I run is ETQW, and I've got a Radeon HD5850, so I may just be covering it up with more hardware.

I can't tell the difference between HL2 in Windows and in WINE on my system. It does require the non-free drivers, but if I'm playing Steam games I'm not likely to be that bothered.

I can, because last time I tried, wine did not provide all the dx9 shaders the engine used. So it certainly looks different to me, as in, slightly better on Windows. But then again it's been a while since I tried it, maybe wine changed significantly since I last did.

The Nvidia drivers run very well in Linux; in the realm of OpenGL, I've literally found no difference in performance or quality. If anything, the Linux drivers are somewhat better-behaved - setting a 16-bit 3D video mode results in ugly dithering in Windows, but not in Linux.

I have not had occasion to try the fglrx drivers on remotely modern hardware, but last time I tried them it was reminiscent of ATI's driver situation in Windows from a decade earlier: glitchy and somewhat prone to memory leaks, but def

I think this is excellent. TF2 already runs pretty great under Wine, I consistently get ~ 60FPS with max resolution and effects.Perhaps if they release a native port I can get closer to the 90FPS I can achieve with Windows.

Not that it really matters much at those rates, but on newer games that will push my hardware to the limits it could be the difference between 20 FPS and 30.

at the risk of burning karma i will post this.I moved completely to linux to get away from drm of this kind. i admit steam is a somewhat successful digital distribution system but the drm they bundled with the games makes them too hard to swallow. requiring a constant internet so the games can phone home when needed, sorry offline mode only works a few times before steam refuses to run games until you get back online. along with removing your control of the installed files for the game by putting them in on

The million-dollar question is, how to get more developers. It takes huge amounts of time to develop all software, games or whatever else, and the time needed grows exponentially with how good you want it to be. How to get programmers so much time, while they still manage to pay their bills. It's understood the software will not be for sale, so...

sorry offline mode only works a few times before steam refuses to run games until you get back online.well since it has online stuff as part of the purpose it does want to "check in" with the servers every once in a while along with removing your control of the installed files for the game by putting them in one big file,thats completely wrong as about 20 seconds at the steam site will show you

i have also heard rumors that it prevents you from making backups of the install files thoughalso wr

They have a selection of their own games to port, they've moved to a cross-platform front-end - there's no reason they would care to build and test all their games on Linux just to sell to the few thousand geeks. Surely if they're putting effort into Linux, it's because they have a more popular Linux-based platform in mind - maybe their own, maybe Chrome OS, Android... but being the owner of a games platform like that without it being tied to expensive PCs, or to consoles with pricey gatekeepers, would be

Nothing in the GPL says that a program cannot have use DRM. I'm not sure where you got that idea, or that it would be "trivial to bypass Steam DRM on Linux." Steam itself is the DRM for most Valve games - you have to log into Steam before playing. Secondly, while certain members of the Linux community may be very anti-DRM, Linux is about freedom. That includes the freedom to install closed source software or DRMed software on your system.

ATI had to do a number reset, as did Nvidia, simply because the numbers were getting too huge. It is actually pretty trivial to compare, simply look for the DirectX version. You can also search the net and find nice charts like this [techarp.com] which will give you details like TDP which will help you make a more informed choice. With the bang for the buck firmly in the AMD camp right now that is what I use, and the easy rule there is 50>70>90, with the 50 being the budget (like my HD4650) followed by the 70 and the 90 being the hardcore chips. And of course for the ultra hardcore you have the X2, which is simply 2 GPUs.

If you are wanting a SFF gaming PC you would be MUCH better off building instead of buying. I have found unless you spend crazy money they tend to use cheaper parts in the SFF boxes and if you build it yourself you can get better choices on parts and CPU/GPU. If you don't mind the advice of an old greybeard PC builder I would probably go with a shuttle such as this one [newegg.com]. Add a 95w Deneb quad, such as the 925 quad, along with one of the low power 5xxx GPUs, and you'd have a nice mini gaming rig. Unfortunately nearly all the "DVD player" styled boxes ATM are Atom based and Atom sucks. So unless you are simply wanting the biggest ePeen I'd look at a quad core AMD with an ATI 5xxx chip for graphics. That is what I've been building for my customers lately and they couldn't be happier with the performance or the power usage.

As for Linux and DRM, the way I always understood it is for DRM to have any kind of chance it has to have low level hooks that the user does NOT have access to, and of course since Linux allows you to get and recompile the source it would be pretty easy to have one person recompile a "DRM disabler" that feeds a false message to the DRM allowing it to run whenever. One of the other posters mentioned TiVo, but that is a "black box" where the DRM is enforced at the hardware level like a PS3 which of course doesn't work with a general purpose box like a PC. And as for steam itself being a form of DRM protection, most of the latest RAZR1911 games are actually Steam rips. So while steam has been bypassed on windows, with a much more "hacker friendly" OS like Linux I doubt it would take any time at all to bypass DRM, which is what I was getting at.

Sorry but getting PCs in more hands wouldn't do any good, because I believe it is ultimately about control. Since the days of code wheels game publishers have wanted to control the user's experience, and now with the x360 and the PS3 being always connected they have their wish. That is why I believe more and more game publishers are screwing over customers, because they'd like to drop their PC division but don't want to hear the shareholders scream. When they have run off enough customers they can say "See?

The correct answer is you'd rather hit ebay, hunt down an original cabinet, perform the maintenance and repair necessary, and then bask in the awe of both your geek and non-geek friends when they see it sitting in your living room.

The modern graphic hardware that can't do better than 720p on most games?
Fixed that for you. There are maybe a handful of true 1080p games for the PS3. Hell, the PS3 can't even render full 720p for some games (see: Modern Warfare, GTA IV, etc).

The fact is, that RSX core is equivalent to the Geforce 7000 series GPUs, and the PS3 came out during the same time when the 8800GTX was available. Thus, the PS3 already had obsolete graphics (compared to PCs anyway) even when it was released.

Valve: Bringing video game DRM to Linux. (And I don't care about how much you think Steam is great and wonderful, it's still DRM and it cannot be tolerated.)

So I guess you don't do gaming at all then? Considering basically 99% of all major game releases these days have some kind of DRM and considering Steam itself is probably the most lax and non-intrusive kind of DRM there IS. And contrary to the horrors of things like Ubisoft "persistent online connection required even for singleplayer" DRM, Steam actually offers some great value to the user. I don't ever have to worry about losing my physical media or the cdkey stickers becoming unreadable. With several game

I know it's a compromise, but at least Valve offer something for their DRM: unlimited downloads (well, at least for Valve's games, too bad some of the other publishers aren't as keen to the idea). I hate to say it, but in the game biz there is a certain amount of hate for Linux and Linux nerds. It is viewed as a money pit and its user's are often typified as pirates, this by a business whose hate for piracy can at times pale that of the *AAs. If Valve wants to throw Linux users a bone, I'm all for it.